Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Steve Wilkos Show

I happened to watch the Steve Wilkos Show today. I had never heard of it, but it seems to be a trashy daytime TV talk show whose purpose is to humiliate people on stage. Today the target was a mother who lost her kids to CPS. Two daughters were there, as was the adoptive mother who had clearly raised those kids to hate their real mother.

And the daughters did hate their mother. So much so that they could be in therapy for the rest of their lives. The two used the same lines, so they appeared to have been coached to say hateful things.

The accusations against her were vague and bizarre, such as ritual animal sacrifice and drinking blood. The mother denied the charges, but did not do a good job of defending herself. The host kept saying that (1) she must be guilty if CPS had taken her kids, (2) she must be crazy if she had been seeing a shrink, and (3) she must not have loved her kids if she had let the authorities take them away without violence.

Is Wilkos an idiot, or just malicious? CPS does take kids away on bogus charges. Once they do, it is nearly impossible to prove innocence. The poor woman had to see a shrink, because CPS required her to. That is how CPS works. The woman contested the charges in the courts. If she had threatened violence, then she would have surely lost all her rights, and probably ended up in jail as well. You cannot fight CPS by threatening violence.

Update: Here is an example of what happens when you refuse a CPS request -- the Mass. father got charged with kidnapping!

Bail was set at $1,500 cash yesterday for a Penn Avenue man accused of striking his 12-year-old daughter with a belt, then refusing to turn her and her two siblings over to the state Department of Children and Families.

Javier Ortiz, 41, of 91 Penn Ave., was arraigned in Central District Court yesterday on charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and three counts of kidnapping of a minor by a relative.